Daily Archives: August 17, 2010

And who are these bloodthirsty Nordic ladies of the pen? As this post is for an English-speaking readership, we limit ourselves to authors translated into English. The Swedish members of this set are, for the moment, Karin Alvtegen, Kerstin Ekman, Inger Frimansson, Mari Jungstedt, Camilla Läckberg, Asa Larsson, Liza Marklund, and Helene Tursten. The Norwegians are Anne Holt and Karin Fossum, in Finland there is Tove Jansson, and in Iceland Yrsa Sigurdardottir. So it is a group numerically dominated by Swedish writers.

This suggests that even fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.

As an example of how Wall Street getting in on this techhology, the UBS Investment Research issued its earnings preview for Wal-Mart’s second quarter, which publicly revealed that UBS had been using used satellite services of private-sector satellite companies to gather the comings and goings of the parking lots at Wal-Mart stores.

Hired thugs, useful idiots, corrupt officials, even hyperinflation, all tiny obstacles when considering the world we could have if the Elites were finally made to face the reckoning they deserve. Americans once took on the greatest empire on Earth. We once took a feared king to task. Are a bunch of frothing corporate bankers really so daunting?

When I was growing up, record stores were a place you could hang out. In a really great store — one of those big city leviathans spread over several stories — you could spend the best part of a day flipping through the racks looking for hard-to-find records, obscure titles, things you’d never even heard of.

Teenagers today probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Who goes to a record store? Why don’t you just download your music onto your iPod?

As recently as 2001 there were music stores everywhere. As many as 80,000 people worked in them, according to the Labor Department. And that was a number that had been steady for years.

In 2002 the iPod took off. Today the number working in music stores is 20,000 — a 75% collapse.

As for the book industry: About 125,000 people still work in book stores and news dealers, according to Labor. How many of them will still have jobs in two years? Another 75,000 work in book publishing. When writers self-publish in electronic format, how many publishers will still be left?